Smoking: sexy or sickly?

Apr 4, 2012

Is smoking a turn-off for you? Photo: iStockphoto

Every cigarette doing your love life damage: True/False?

I’ve started watching Mad Men again. Consequently, I itch to finger long, white, sentence punctuating cigarettes. And when I do, on occasion, slip a stick between my lips and light up, it’s not long before I’m washing the smoke down with thoughts of smoking and smokers, and a Manhattan or two.

But these are dangerous thoughts to have in these health-conscious times. I feel naughty even admitting that I’m a cocktail hour tobacco puffer. Will I beplain packaged for admitting I enjoy the odd cigar?

Did you know that 214 women aged between 20 and 40 living within 25 kilometres of Brisbane say they smoke regularly or would date someone who smokes regularly? The result for men the same age was 355. I know this because RSVP told me so. My subsequent search for men and women who did not smoke numbered enough for the catchall ‘over 600’ result. Rewind 50 years and it would have been a different story. Not better, but different.

“It can become very unsociable; if you go outside for a cigarette, the other person stays inside.”

So witness the rise of exhibit A: DatingforSmokers.com and sites just like it dedicated to helping smokers find other smokers to smoke and fall in love with. There are other sites dedicated to smokers, though they don’t always require the user to have a habit of their own. Witness exhibit B: SmokingFestishKingdom.com, the SFW version of plenty of NSFW sites my IT Support team are still raising eyebrows over. Yes folks, there is such a thing as capnolagnia, sexual fetish for the smell or image of smoking.

Actually, there has been quite a bit of research on the subject. A recent studyexplored this fetishism in relation to social conditioning and childhood experiences. The evolutionary psychologists found, among other things, that both hetero and homosexual males were more attracted to smoking if their mother smoked. So men really do want to marry their mothers after all?

Back to the question at hand; are cigarettes ruining people’s love lives?

In Australia, latest ABS figures show around 8 million of us aged 15 years and over had smoked at some time, with 3.3 million identifying as current smokers. The vast majority (91 per cent) of these smoke daily, and, as RSVP so scientifically showed, males were more likely to be current smokers than females (22 per cent compared with 18 per cent).

Yet people still smoke. Some people still think having a smoke is still made out to be cool. And some people will probably never stop.

So here’s what I want to know; would your feelings about someone change if you knew they were a smoker? Do you think smoking is sexy? If you are a smoker, what has been your experience – do you feel like a social pariah? Is it hard to get a date?

I don’t think I’d ever say never to cigarettes, or cigars, or hookah pipes for that matter. I’m not really the sort of person to mind judgement much, though the opinions of dear ones do matter to me. If I was dating someone with a vehement opposition to my very occasional smoke, someone who offered me a take-tobacco-and-leave-me ultimatum, I’d probably find their inflexibility more problematic than my rare behaviour. Of course, I’m defending the right to choose here, not practice of smoking per se.